Search This Blog

Pages

A Hole In The Plan

For the last sixty years the only way to enter the cellar has been through this outdoor access.

Ever since we first looked at this house back in May we decided to add a staircase from the dining room to the cellar. Having an interior staircase would allow the lower level to be counted as part of the house, adding another 450 square feet. And easy access to the basement will allow us to move the washer and dryer out of the dining room and into a new basement laundry room. We turned in our building permit application yesterday and 24 hours and $58 later we have the approval to cut the hole for the basement (plus a some other structural changes that we will get to later).

When we got home tonight our dining room looked like this.
And now it looks like this
You may have noticed that the staircase hole is in the way of both the side door and the doorway between the living room and dining room. The only way to access the bedrooms and bathrooms is by going through this doorway and through the kitchen. So having a hole in the only path through the house is kind of an inconvenience. Our solution to the hole in the floor was to add a hole in the wall. This screen separates the living room from the bedroom hallway.
We removed the screen and ripped out the wall to create a doorway. Opening this part of the wall was part of the long-term plan so we won't have to repair it later.
Now that the hole is cut we can start work on the stringers and get some stairs built.

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I recently announced that we had sold our home in Helena and will be moving to my hometown in July. We did some house-hunting over Easter weekend and I'm please to report success. We are in the process of buying our latest home:
I know you can't see it well behind the trees. I'm so excited to have actual trees on the property. The house itself is nestled against the base of a hill which will block our views of the sunset but the east-facing front porch should offer some wonderful sunrises. And here's a sneak peek of our view.
I won't be posting any more photos until we've actually closed on the house. Closing is still two months away and a lot could change before then. Still, I look forward to sharing our latest project.

We sold our house last week. This may come as a surprise since the house wasn't even for sale.
We weren't planning to move. Everything in the house was designed with the idea that we would be living here for years. But sometimes God makes it abundantly clear that He has other plans. In the course of just a few days Luke was offered a chance to move to his company branch in my hometown and we met a family looking for a house in our neighborhood. And now our house is under contract.
Closing is scheduled for mid-July so I will have a little time to recover from having the baby, but until she arrives I've been packing up all our non-essentials. We have already started looking for our next home; maybe it will be a home we get to enjoy for decades. We'll just have to wait and see.

When we bought the house the basement was classified as unfinished. The previous owners had made a haphazard effort to convert some of it into living space, but the carpentry was so bad that you would have to be drunk to consider it livable. From what we have heard about the previous owners drunk was probably how the work was done. Anyway, this space at the bottom of the stairs was used as two bedrooms; one directly in front of you and the other through the door to the left. We moved the bedrooms to the far corner of the basement so they could share an egress window well and used the two bedrooms as one large media room. The tray ceiling hides the pipes for the radiant floor heat and also distracts the eye from the beam running down the middle of the room. While we needed the tray in in one spot for practical reasons running it all the way around the room created a nice visual effect. The basement stays comfortably warm from the radiant heat for the 1st floor but we also added a ga…